Project II/12

I admit openly, that this year's projecting under the labels of painting and building has been pretty slow. Despite that my second german cat is done! Awesome, wonderful and exciting!

The final stretch

Those track links I advertised the last time found themselves painted, messified and cleaned up before I threw them to the rear sides of the tank. There were six slots for these and I had four sets of track pieces to divide however I pleased. For a change I went asymmetrically and gave the left side three pieces and a single one on the right side.All the empty slots got those L-shaped pieces to show that there could be something. The remaining eight L-pieces I cut short and glued them on the top of their places. Should someone take a look at my model from below, that one'd notice that the bottom parts have gone missing.

A mess

To make my model pretty I made it dirty. A muddy tank was my goal, so the tracks, the rear deck and the top of the copmartment got some Tamiya weathering master set's "mud" pigment. I guess it looks like some people have been roaming on top of my tank with poopy boots. At least I hope that's the impression any observers get. The muzzle brake of the 88PaK43 was dirtified with Vallejo's 73116 "Carbon Black". I really have to learn how to use that stuff, it feels so weird compared to the Tamiya's makeup.
Lastly I poked the tracks and the lower hull with my Tamiya weathering stick ("Mud"). Maybe this time I didn't get overexcited with it?

 

SdKfz 173 Ausf. G1 Early Production

Pictures, as usual, tell more than a thousand words:

The infamous muzzle brake

Of course I could've changed another lens to the camera, but I wanted to see what kind of photos I get with this one, in the dark of the evening and under electric lights. Now I've tried it out.
Should anyone know what I used as the background, they'll get a point.

Coming up

Next I'll take up the brits or polish army but I shall still remain rolling in mud and who knows what. Maybe even next week my "almost FiFo" work queue pops out my gift kit: Italeri's M-10 Achilles.

Rustification preparation

Lasse's earlier comments in my silly blog's finnish version stuck to my head and I decided to try his method. More or less, because I don't have the exact colours he mentioned but that's never a real issue anyway. The idea is what it is and I'll do what I get to do.

This is going to be ugly

My target is the set of track links on the rear sides of the tank, they aren't muddy and lumpy but pieces that have been hanging there for a good while. So the base is going to be Flat Alu, dirtified by a very diluted mix of Flat Brown and my own custom orange made of Vallejo's Game Colors (Bloody Red + Bald Moon Yellow). I think it sounds like a good, useful idea but you can disagree all you want ;)

Carrying more crap

This time I added some of the missing knickknack to the sides and winterized them, too. Not much is left anymore, the tow cables (should they survive) and the fixing of the tracks. Right now I just couldn't find the motivation to fight with them so I did something else, while I still could :)

Even the tow cable is there!

Dirty tracks

I got something done again, track-painting to be more exact. You'll see it in the pics that my badly set lights (I rushed to paint on the expense of proper preparation) ended up causing some "bald patches" that I need to fix later. Yeah, it's my own fault.

In any case, the process was pretty straightforward. The base layer was done with Tamiya's XF-10 (Flat Brown) and later on top of that I liberally drybrushed some Tamiya's XF-16 (Flat Aluminium). Because that Al layer didn't look good enough I applied a Citadel's devlan mud wash. The result ended up pretty decent in my opinion, it's just a shame that I have to fix a couple of places afterwards.